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Did You Attract Automated Competition Entries In June or July?

Published on 2nd August 2011

Our last blog about automated competition entry services featured Prize Draw Centre and who owns the business, but PDC are not the only company making a mockery of online comping (in our view). Two other sites (at least known) exist and they’re WeWin4U and Win24. The latter is the most well known possibly because they are advertised on Idealworld TV.

Now Idealworld TV run their own prize draws, but there’s nothing in their competition rules about automated entries, bulk entries or third party entries – which is a shame as it would have made a nice angle for this blog.

Perhaps Idealworld are happy to have their competitions swamped with people not interested in their website? And perhaps they’re not too bothered about the damage automated competition entries do to other brand’s promotions? Maybe we’ll be able to get a comment from them about this?

Anyway back to Win24 and our monthly review of the sites they’ve been targeting. Over the few month’s that we’ve been doing this check it’s become noticeable that these automated entry services do like to target the competitions that close at the end of the month. For June’s entries, of the 195 competitions entered (as listed on their website) 100 closed on 30th June. The numbers for July are slightly different with 84 of 203 competitions ending on 31st July.

The good news for genuine compers is that still gives them a lot of competitions that aren’t being swamped by maybe up to 5000 extra entries from people who don’t even make the effort to enter their own details. However, we’d like every competition being managed fairly and even one competition accepting automated entries is one too many.

So who’s on the list?

Well in June we saw the following sites targeted: Dulux, Andrex, One Stop Phone Shop, Just Eat, Zavvi, Wilkinson Plus, Love Out Lamb, At Home Magazine, The Telegraph, Clothes Show Live, Freesat, Bighams, Pocket Lint, Sports Discount, Eye of Horus, Thatchers Gold, Handbag, Amazon, Tic Watches, Fonehouse, Virgin Media, Natoora, Pots and Pans, LG, Debenhams, Bears on the Square and The Independent. Remember that this is just a handful of around 200 competitions!

By the way, we know which sites are targeted because it’s published on their website.

It’s Not In The Rules!!

A quick look at the terms of some of the competitions mentioned and sadly “entries from third parties, bulk entries and automated entries” is missing from just about every one we looked at. That’s ridiculously poor competition management – and not what we’d expect from some of the brands named here. Surely they want to award their prizes to people who actually make the effort to visit their website?

Some brands who do appear on the lists have told us that they have a policy in place to deal with automated competition entries – if that’s the case why not just add “no bulk entries or entries from third parties and/or automated services will be accepted”. From what we can gauge Win24 do seem to target the sites that don’t spell this out in their rules. If more sites started to include this simple line of text in their rules then that could have a massive impact!

The good news is that some sites are on the ball. We found this article from Tincan reporting that they’ve got a solution to Win24 competition entries. So if you’ve got a competition and need a solution then these guys might be able to help. There’s also some useful advice on our blog.